I'll preface this by saying that on the topic of file and data formats in general, I am intensely conservative. I think it's ridiculous to switch to a new format or compression scheme, unless the benefits are massive -- in particular I've never understood people who seem to gleefully parade from one file compression system to the next every few years, abandoning perfectly good and well-understood formats for ones that don't have decent, widely-available reference implementations; but I digress -- but I'm rather bullish on DNG.
I don't know whether Adobe will pull it off, but I hope that it succeeds, or at least survives.
TIFF is a huge mess. Let's face it; it's a gigantic cockup. Anyone can write TIFF files, but they're nearly impossible to "read" in the sense that a user is going to expect: if I say that my application will "read TIFFs," they're going to expect that anything with a TIF extension is going to get read. And that's almost never the case; you can pack just too much stuff into the container.
(Although container formats have a certain elegance to them from a geek perspective, I'm not sure they're all they're cracked up to be. The number of times I've gotten a video file that I don't have a codec for, but have no way of knowing about until I try to open it, because the codec is concealed inside the MOV or AVI container, or similar problems with TIFs, is beyond number. There's some good sense in eliminating container formats, or at least tying the file extension and other metadata, not to the container, but to the codec inside.)
What I hope that Adobe can do, is give us some neutral ground that the various camera manufacturers can agree to use, so we can break away from the per-manufacturer RAW file formats, and the TIFF morass for interchange.
DNG already has support in probably the biggest single application of consequence, and that's Photoshop, and now they've got quite a few camera manufacturers on board, and the specification is open so there are FOSS implementations. Ed Hamrick's excellent VueScan scanning software produces them, too, and perhaps SilverFast will join the party sometime soon. If they can get the middle-market of consumer and prosumer cameras on board, then I think it will have a chance at achieving dominance from the imaging sensors on down the chain.
There's a lot to be said for it; anyone can implement it, but at the same time, there's some centralized control over the format, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can't build on their own crappy extension to the format and create the sort of Balkanization that's plagued TIFF. Hopefully, this will mean that people can implement it, and be confident that if they say that their app will 'read DNG,' that it will actually read all the various types of DNG files that users will throw at it.
If that's the only thing that DNG did, it would be a huge step forward.
Is PAR2 open-source? It seems like it is, but I certainly wouldn't want to do long-term archives of my data in any format where there were only binary decoders available.
A while back I had an absolute devil of a time trying to unpack some Compact Pro archives (.sea), and that's not really even that old a format -- it was last released in 1995 -- and there are still a lot of Classic Macs around that will run the software. However, in another 10 years, I'd imagine that it would be a lot tougher, since Macs being manufactured now won't run the Classic OS. (Unless someone reverse-engineers it, which I think has been done or at least discussed; according to WP macutils will do it. But hoping that somebody will reverse-engineer your proprietary archive format before you need it isn't the sort of risk you'd want to consciously take.)
At least with formats like TAR and GZIP, not only are they very well understood, but you could easily put a copy of the source code onto each piece of backup media; that way if somewhere down the road, you needed to get your data off on a machine that didn't have the proper decoder or didn't have the capability of running the binary decoder (Microsoft is going to have to break backwards-compatibility sometime...), you wouldn't be completely screwed. And most of all, you'd still be OK even if you turned out to make a bad decision on your choice of format, and it maybe didn't end up being as overwhelmingly popular as you thought it'd be.
I'd really hate to plop all my data into some proprietary archive or compression format in order to save a few percent, and then end up cursing myself (or having someone else curse me) a few decades down the line, when they're left with a binary blob and a decoder that will only run on obsolete hardware, using an obsolete architecture, running an obsolete OS.
People seem to chronically underestimate the lifespan of data. The backup of your vacation photos that you make now, may very well be something that you're going to want to get at in 20 or 50 years. Heck, I've scanned slides that are older than that. A whole lot of folks seem to not really consider the long term when they're backing up and archiving data, and in an average day, it's probably one of the more longer-lived decisions you're likely to make.
I actually have a theory that they're doing this on purpose; anyone who wants to can see the writing on the wall, which is that IPv6 is going to happen at some point in the not-too-distant future.
By selling stuff that doesn't have IPv6 support, they're hoping to manufacture a crisis down the road, where everyone will have to go out and get new gear.
Look at it from the perspective of Linksys or Netgear. Customers aren't looking for IPv6 support now; they'll go and buy up $39.99 routers regardless. So why are they going to build that functionality in for free now, when they can wait five years, and then sell everyone a brand new $59 routers with IPv6 support, and then toss the old one in the trash?
For the makers of network hardware, the changeover is a perfect way to force obsolescence. This is why even though today's hardware is capable of it, I doubt we'll see many firmware upgrades to enable IPv6 support (unless they charge for the FW upgrades) -- they're going to wait until people can't get online with IPv4 anymore, and then are forced to buy new gear.
In that case they're obviously adding value, and should -- in my opinion -- be able to regain copyright and control over that data.
Uh, no -- that's a terrible idea. The expense involved doesn't buy you a new copyright, if the content is Public Domain, and you're not somehow incorporating it into a new Work, then it's still public domain when it comes out the other end.
What you're talking about is exactly the same sort of a "broadcaster's copyright" that WIPO (read: big media companies) wants to push on us, where they could take things that either aren't copywritable, or are expired, or are in the Public Domain, and re-copyright them just by broadcasting them.
This would allow the person who controls the source, even if that source is in the Public Domain, to have a perpetual copyright, because they could license their broadcasts under terms that would require you to delete or destroy them before they expired (or use DRM that enforced this, which it would be a crime to circumvent).
The point of Public Domain material, is that you can reproduce it and when it comes out the other end, it's still public domain. If you can take public domain and "wrap" it in another layer of copyright which actually taints and eliminates it's public-domain-ness, then you've just gutted the entire concept of having material that's not under copyright. You're saying then, that only the original copy of a public domain material is not under copyright, and that anytime anyone copies that, a new copyright is put in place. That's not how it's supposed to work. Copyright follows the information/content, not some physical artifact.
Anyone asking for a "broadcast copyright" is effectively asking for a perpetual copyright, because that's how it would end up. I think Jack Valenti is a scumbag, but at least he has the balls to come out and actually say that's what he wants.
Exactly. If you want it for 'free', get up off your lazy butts and go tape it yourself. If you want it for the low, low price of telling where it came from, you can now use C-Span's media.
No, the real question here is whether going out and taping something is a creative enough act to warrant a separate Copyright on the recording, than is on the original performance or Work. (Which really boils down to, it the taping some sort of creative act, in and of itself, or is it more like mechanical transcription?)
Copyright doesn't protect effort. I can spend a lifetime compiling a database of recipes, or sports scores, or photocopying/photographing old rare books, and anyone who wants to can use the information out of that (in the case of the recipe book, the layout and narrative text in the recipes might be protected, but not the recipe itself). Nobody is really interested in how much work or effort C-SPAN put into taping things. That doesn't, and shouldn't, earn them a new copyright.
I think it's a hugely dangerous and generally Bad Idea, to create a new layer of copyright protection every time someone mechanically reproduces, copies, or records something. We already have enough complexity, and there are ways that a "reproduction copyright" could be easily (ab)used to lock up works where the originals are unavailable, indefinitely. (Viz.: Disney, who could simply only release recordings of things they have in their "vault" under licenses that don't allow reproduction and which force the destruction of the recordings before their copyright could expire; even though the subject of the recordings would be in the public domain, the recording/retransmission would not be, and thus it would be under a perpetual Copyright.) By recopyrighting mechanical reproductions that do not contain any creative input, you allow whoever possesses the "master" copy to dodge the Public Domain indefinitely.
We need to draw a clear line in the sand as to what things are creative enough to warrant (re)protection, and what are not. Setting up a camera and pointing it at someone, ought not buy you a new copyright on the finished recording. I say this, as someone who spent years lugging a BetaSP camera around -- there's effort there, but it's not creating a new Work, it's just recording one that's already there, however ephemeral. Now, if that video were then taken and edited into something else, that finished, edited composition would have a new Copyright, obviously, but little individual slices of it wouldn't (because they'd be public domain), in the same way I could assemble a photo-montage out of public-domain photos and have the whole thing copyrighted, but not the individual photos inside, if you were to copy just a single one of those and remove it from the whole.
Not necessarily. It would just mean that you'd need to pay for the cost of creating programming during it's first run on TV, and you couldn't resell the same show multiple times. Which actually is how most TV works (well, worked; DVD sales are bigger and bigger now).
The way TV is traditionally paid for, is that the stations sell advertising time, and then they pay the networks (well, actually the networks themselves sell a lot of advertising directly; the locals only get to sell some of a program's ads), and then the network buys the programming from a studio, or produces it itself.
So, for instance, even if the Super Bowl or "24" went immediately into the public domain as they were broadcast, they'd still get on TV, because they make a killing just in their first run. It's the advertising shown during their first broadcast that pays for their creation; any subsequent revenues are just additional profit.
Now, it would certainly change the landscape of television, but it wouldn't "kill TV" outright. The business models which currently operate would have to change dramatically, but there's still a lot of money to be made in entertainment. As long as that demand exists, and people are willing to pay money for it, someone will meet the demand.
1 public IP to 1 private IP? Not much use, really then.
It's not (well, there are some situations where you'd want it, but they're mostly special cases) but most of the usefulness of NAT really comes from it also being a stateful firewall, which keeps track of network connections and thus can hide multiple hosts behind a single IP just by modifying the destination address of the packets as they pass through.
Really, it's academic to say what functionality is part of the "firewall" and what is part of "NAT," because they're almost always an integrated unit, but what I was trying to get at is that a "NAT box" without a stateful firewall (meaning, it only worked 1:1) would be a pretty sorry appliance, and of very limited usefulness. Most of its usefulness, and all of its security, are the result of the connection-tracking, which is also part of every stateful firewall.
Or, conversely, you can remove the NATing functionality from a stateful firewall, and still have all the security benefits that you had with NAT, including blocking of all incoming connections, blocking certain ports to certain hosts, etc. When you take out the "NAT" part, all you're doing is telling the firewall not to modify the IP address anymore, and to pass the packet straight through if that packet is allowed by its rules. There seems to be this idea that you can't have a firewall without NAT, and that's just stupid. Of course people will still have firewalls after the IPv6 migration. They'll probably look suspiciously like the 'home router' boxes we have right now, and will do exactly the same things, except for the IP masquerading / NAT.
To get all the same security as you currently have with IPv4+NAT/FW, all you need to do is use a v6 firewall (which might be just a software upgrade for your router, although I doubt this because the manufacturers will want you to buy a new one) with a default rule that blocks incoming connections. Of course, to get most of the benefits of IPv6, you'll need more complex rules which might allow some incoming connections, but it's trivial to make a IPv6 network just as locked-down as a typically configured IPv4 NATed arrangement.
It is only FAIR to move to IPv6 for the sake of developing countries that will someday find their way onto the Internet in increasing numbers.
Whatever you do, please do not say this in public, because I can't think of anything more damaging to the potential adoption of IPv6, than to paint it as some sort of charity project that will "help" developing countries (particularly because what you're not saying is that it will help them become more competitive with the West).
Nobody is going to spend money to do that, and if they were, they'd probably just contact a charity or something. People are going to go to IPv6 for two reasons: (1) because they have to, because IPv4 addresses will start becoming hard to get, and therefore expensive, and (2) because IPv6 will allow for all sorts of new services, protocols, and applications (like practical user-to-user videoconferencing without a lot of centralized auto-negotiation, multihoming VOIP, and lots of stuff that hasn't been invented yet).
The fact that it will, indeed, help developing countries get online ought to be mentioned as a nice, warm-and-fuzzy coincidence, if it's mentioned at all. Nobody is interested in paying money for that.
It's no harder than it is right now. Most of your portable devices already have unique serial numbers. Your cellphone has two, one in the handset and another in the SIM card. Your computer has a MAC address, probably more than one. Someone could track you with any of these.
IPv6 doesn't change any of this; it just lets you take the same IP address with you when you move from one network to the other, but it doesn't keep you from changing it arbitrarily, or somehow check to see whether your address is the same as your interface's MAC address or not. If you want to use some other randomly generated number instead of your hardware MAC address, you can do that. If you want to change it when you move from one network to another, you can do that, too, but you'll of course drop any connections you had, until you reestablish a connection using the new address to whatever service you were using.
There are some opportunities for very bad design choices in IPv6, but we're just going to have to try and steer people away from making them: for instance, trying to use an address as a user identifier rather than as a temporary network-node identifier. You're still going to have to have logins and passwords, which are managed at some higher level; if someone tried to make the IPv6 address into some sort of per-user authentication credential, that would be a Bad Thing.
But even Microsoft seems to have figured that part out; Windows doesn't even use the MAC address in IPv6, it randomly generates a number, and it's not persistent across reboots (which is/would-be a PITA in other situations, but not for the things most Windows users want to do). So right there, you've got a whole lot of computers that are just going to be using arbitrary values as addresses. That ought to throw a wrench into anyone's evil-genius (or just idiotic) plans to use IPv6s for per-user tracking.
Take a look at Comcast's huge migration of their cable modem customer edge.
I wasn't aware of this. Has Comcast migrated its cable modem subscribers over to IPv6?
Sadly I don't have a v6-capable router at that end of my network. (I have two routers, a good one -- WRT54GL with DD-WRT -- and a crappy one -- some shoddy Netgear box -- and unfortunately have to use the Netgear for the headend NAT, because the '54GL is the only one which will act as a wireless bridge.)
If I were to put a IPv6 capable router on the WAN, would it get a v6 address from Comcast? That would almost make it worth going out and getting another decent router.
Most of the IPv6 stacks have an option to either use the interface's MAC address, or they can randomly generate a number of similar length and use that instead. BSD and Linux use the MAC address but can be changed, Windows uses a random number by default.
First, NAT by itself doesn't offer that much security, once you get it outfitted with UPnP and other stuff that allow users to do the things they want to do, without messing around with it too much. (Actually, NAT in its purest implementation, without a stateful firewall at all, wouldn't offer any security, because it would only serve one host, and it would forward all connections to it, incoming and outgoing. But all home "NAT boxes" also have firewalls and serve multiple hosts, and have the side-effect of blocking incoming connections.)
Second, there are applications coming that aren't going to play well with NAT, particularly internet telephony. We need to get rid of NAT in order to allow for WiFi/cellular phones, and portable devices that will multihome across networks. There are whole classes of applications and technologies that will be possible, once the infrastructure allows for things like this, and NAT is holding it back.
Complaining because NAT makes your printers easier to set up securely, and thus ought to be kept around, is a little like people who grumbled that persistent network connections between campus mainframes were a huge security risk, and that everyone would be better if we just stuck with UUCP and nightly dial-ins. While they may have been right, I think we can all agree that the benefits, in hindsight, of not all being stuck on isolated systems that only connected to each other at midnight to exchange traffic, outweigh the hazards. (If you disagree, signal your discontent by reaching behind your PC and unplugging that network cable or antenna.) It's a shortsighted position.
Until households and "dumb devices" get globally routable addresses, we won't know the sort of things that we can do with them. The ideas that people have outlined today -- the ability to use broadband applications on your cellphone or portable device over your connection at home, and then seamlessly failover to the cellular network (or another WiFi network, or whatever) when you walk out of range, without dropping the connection or needing to do a messy DHCP renewal -- that's just the beginning. That's like someone in 1985 trying to give a sales pitch about the Internet: how many things do we have now that weren't really possible to foresee at that point? (Good and bad.) A whole lot.
Third, even with the widespread adoption of NAT, we're still running out of IPv4s. There are enough applications and situations out there that require routable addresses, that even if we were to use NAT on everything, we'd still run out. It's a temporary solution at best, and an admittedly very cool hack, but we're coming to the end of the road for it. It's time to implement a real solution.
I think that falls under the category of "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." At most, it might buy us a few more months of IPv4dom, but at what cost? And by diverting those resources to IPv4 recovery, how much more painful are we going to make the transition to IPv6 when we do run out? Because the numbers are clear, we are going to run out of allocatable IPv4 addresses eventually. Distracting people by telling them that it's the Class A blocks that are the problem isn't going to make that easier; it's just going to make the eventual runout into a catastrophe instead of a page-three technology topic.
Even better, I love how the article really heads off about 50 comments worth of Slashdot discussion:
This is usually when someone brings up NAT. Home routers (and a lot of enterprise equipment) use a technique called "network address translation" so that a single IP address can be shared by a larger number of hosts. The discussion usually goes like this:
"Use NAT, n00b. All 1337 of my Linux boxes share a single IP and it's safer, too!"
Step 1: Workers leave == Country gets poorer. Step 2. Workers come in == Country gets richer.
Only if those workers contribute more to the economy and pay more into the system than they consume. It's trivially demonstrable that people at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum consume more than they contribute, and thus are a net drag economically; so it doesn't make sense to let any more of them in.
Holy crap, this so called website does look like somebody from law school put it together as part of some bizarro school project. They should hire Slashdot to create a better one with more options for stalking other lawyers.
I haven't even been to the site yet, but let me get this straight: it uses forum software that's worse than Slashdot, and it's full of lawyers.
Sure, but what about the "grey" area of: it's not libel or slander, but it does violate the personal privacy of the the object. These aren't "public" persona's, after all.
That's the nice thing about the Law; it really cuts down on those grey areas. Either it's libel or slander, or it's not. Either it's stalking, or it's not. Either it's a crime, or it's not. If it's not, you can say it.
Now, sometimes it can be difficult to determine if it's a crime or not, because we have such a byzantine legal system, but thankfully, we have people who spend their lives studying it, and can render informed opinions on whether things may or may not be illegal. They're called lawyers, and I don't think this guy has them in short supply.
You surrender all copyrights to anything you broadcast onto the public's spectrum, but you're free, on narrowly-defined two-way communications bands, to use any form of encryption, encoding, or obfuscation that you want. At the same time, there's no reverse-engineering protection, so no whining if your encryption turns out to be crap.
To be honest, I'd be satisfied with retaining the current copyright structure but just getting rid of the bizarre anti-circumvention provisions, because that's where all the trouble we're in currently, got started. If you're broadcasting a signal that ends up in my house, I ought to be able to do anything I want with it. If you make it impossible to do anything useful with it, without paying you for a decryption key, well perhaps I'll pay you. But if your encryption sucks, that's not my, nor the government's problem.
yeah...except the 'privite controlled method' would be putting more powerfull transmitters all of the place and walking all over everybody elses signal.
Erm, no, that would be illegal. What he's saying is that if you didn't want to give up copyright, you need to own the distribution method also. So, you'd need to sell DVDs or pump the signal out via a cable system that you own every inch of (plus all the ground underneath it, the right-of-ways, etc.).
Joking aside, this is far bigger than an "internet issue;" it's a Copyright issue, and that means it's going to affect not only the internet, but virtually all types of media. When people start re-jiggering Copyright, they're manipulating the foundations that underlie (or undermine, depending on your point of view) our shared culture.
The proposed "broadcast copyright" that's being debated by WIPO would be an absolute disaster. It would probably be the most fundamental change in U.S. law since it was first laid down, because it would basically allow for re-copyrighting of a work without any creative input or modification.
Right now, if I take a work and simply reproduce it without any modifications at all, there's no additional copyright added. Thus, a photo-reproduction of an old work, like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, is still public domain. It's only when I start doing something to it, that it becomes a new work, and subject to another 100+ years of protection. What the draft WIPO treaty would change, is that simply by reproducing/transmitting, a new layer of copyright would be created. So if I "broadcasted" the 1911 Encyclopedia to you, suddenly it wouldn't just have the expired 1911 copyright on it, it would also have my 2007 copyright on the "broadcast."
As long as you kept the originals locked away somewhere, so that the only way people could ever witness them was via a "broadcast," and then you didn't allow them to record or store those broadcasts, you could effectively extend copyright forever.
They'd better be profitable; consider alternatives
on
High Tech High 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Your solution only works if paying 'real salaries' is profitable(leaving aside the discussion of whether they are or not, job creation depends on it being profitable to pay someone to do work).
More importantly, we have to ensure that it's profitable. America can't compete with the Third World on wages; it's just not going to happen. The cost of living here is just too high, and unless we want to reduce our standard of living in order to reduce the costs, we have to figure out a way to shield American companies from direct foreign competition. That's the long and short of it, and it's what nobody really wants to say. We have a standard of living that's only achieved by very high costs; companies in other areas don't have these problems. But unless we want to reduce our standards to that of Calcutta's, trying to compete isn't an option.
At least for the moment, America is by far the largest goods-market in the world. We need to use this to our advantage, by ensuring that American companies, and other companies from areas that pay workers well, receive preferential access.
There's quite simply no other way to ensure that workers here are paid enough to maintain our expected standard of living. If we allow immigration and bring in low-cost workers from abroad, wages plummet. If we don't allow immigration but allow cheap imports, than domestic companies go bankrupt (or offshore everything) because they're no longer profitable. Either way, you end up with us collapsing our own economy.
We need to take a far more aggressive stance towards ensuring that our way of life is economically sustainable into the future, and right now I think we're on a collision course with disaster. Nothing less than our way of life is at stake.
Well, note that none of them were in the United States; countries further removed from the events of 9/11 might not have gotten the memo yet: namely, that there's only going to be one way out of a hijacked aircraft, and that's inside a body bag.
Or maybe they have nicer terrorists there. Who knows.
Exactly. If this system ever comes online then hijackers will simply plan and figure out a way to disable the system. Its easier said than done, and probably very costly, but if you get the right hackers you can break into (almost) any system. - Ayal Rosenthal
While this may be true, it doesn't mean that deploying such a system isn't worth it.
What you're saying is exactly like "if we get a bank vault, the thieves will just plan and figure out a way to get into the vault. It's easier said than done, and probably very costly, but if you get the right safecrackers, you can break into almost any bank."
Well, yeah -- but the point isn't that the system is foolproof, it's that the system discourages criminals, or makes them less likely to succeed, before they can be caught or neutralized by other means. Every bank knows that their vault can be broken into with enough effort -- all you need is a big drillpress with a magnetic base, and a diamond-burr coring tool, and enough knowledge of the vault to know where to drill -- but that doesn't mean that they just leave their money out on the counter at night.
By making it harder to hijack a plane, you require any potential hijackers to have more resources, which limits the pool of potential attackers. Rather than hundreds of terrorist groups who could hijack an airliner, you might shorten the list to a few dozen.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll preface this by saying that on the topic of file and data formats in general, I am intensely conservative. I think it's ridiculous to switch to a new format or compression scheme, unless the benefits are massive -- in particular I've never understood people who seem to gleefully parade from one file compression system to the next every few years, abandoning perfectly good and well-understood formats for ones that don't have decent, widely-available reference implementations; but I digress -- but I'm rather bullish on DNG.
I don't know whether Adobe will pull it off, but I hope that it succeeds, or at least survives.
TIFF is a huge mess. Let's face it; it's a gigantic cockup. Anyone can write TIFF files, but they're nearly impossible to "read" in the sense that a user is going to expect: if I say that my application will "read TIFFs," they're going to expect that anything with a TIF extension is going to get read. And that's almost never the case; you can pack just too much stuff into the container.
(Although container formats have a certain elegance to them from a geek perspective, I'm not sure they're all they're cracked up to be. The number of times I've gotten a video file that I don't have a codec for, but have no way of knowing about until I try to open it, because the codec is concealed inside the MOV or AVI container, or similar problems with TIFs, is beyond number. There's some good sense in eliminating container formats, or at least tying the file extension and other metadata, not to the container, but to the codec inside.)
What I hope that Adobe can do, is give us some neutral ground that the various camera manufacturers can agree to use, so we can break away from the per-manufacturer RAW file formats, and the TIFF morass for interchange.
DNG already has support in probably the biggest single application of consequence, and that's Photoshop, and now they've got quite a few camera manufacturers on board, and the specification is open so there are FOSS implementations. Ed Hamrick's excellent VueScan scanning software produces them, too, and perhaps SilverFast will join the party sometime soon. If they can get the middle-market of consumer and prosumer cameras on board, then I think it will have a chance at achieving dominance from the imaging sensors on down the chain.
There's a lot to be said for it; anyone can implement it, but at the same time, there's some centralized control over the format, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can't build on their own crappy extension to the format and create the sort of Balkanization that's plagued TIFF. Hopefully, this will mean that people can implement it, and be confident that if they say that their app will 'read DNG,' that it will actually read all the various types of DNG files that users will throw at it.
If that's the only thing that DNG did, it would be a huge step forward.
Is PAR2 open-source? It seems like it is, but I certainly wouldn't want to do long-term archives of my data in any format where there were only binary decoders available.
A while back I had an absolute devil of a time trying to unpack some Compact Pro archives (.sea), and that's not really even that old a format -- it was last released in 1995 -- and there are still a lot of Classic Macs around that will run the software. However, in another 10 years, I'd imagine that it would be a lot tougher, since Macs being manufactured now won't run the Classic OS. (Unless someone reverse-engineers it, which I think has been done or at least discussed; according to WP macutils will do it. But hoping that somebody will reverse-engineer your proprietary archive format before you need it isn't the sort of risk you'd want to consciously take.)
At least with formats like TAR and GZIP, not only are they very well understood, but you could easily put a copy of the source code onto each piece of backup media; that way if somewhere down the road, you needed to get your data off on a machine that didn't have the proper decoder or didn't have the capability of running the binary decoder (Microsoft is going to have to break backwards-compatibility sometime...), you wouldn't be completely screwed. And most of all, you'd still be OK even if you turned out to make a bad decision on your choice of format, and it maybe didn't end up being as overwhelmingly popular as you thought it'd be.
I'd really hate to plop all my data into some proprietary archive or compression format in order to save a few percent, and then end up cursing myself (or having someone else curse me) a few decades down the line, when they're left with a binary blob and a decoder that will only run on obsolete hardware, using an obsolete architecture, running an obsolete OS.
People seem to chronically underestimate the lifespan of data. The backup of your vacation photos that you make now, may very well be something that you're going to want to get at in 20 or 50 years. Heck, I've scanned slides that are older than that. A whole lot of folks seem to not really consider the long term when they're backing up and archiving data, and in an average day, it's probably one of the more longer-lived decisions you're likely to make.
I actually have a theory that they're doing this on purpose; anyone who wants to can see the writing on the wall, which is that IPv6 is going to happen at some point in the not-too-distant future.
By selling stuff that doesn't have IPv6 support, they're hoping to manufacture a crisis down the road, where everyone will have to go out and get new gear.
Look at it from the perspective of Linksys or Netgear. Customers aren't looking for IPv6 support now; they'll go and buy up $39.99 routers regardless. So why are they going to build that functionality in for free now, when they can wait five years, and then sell everyone a brand new $59 routers with IPv6 support, and then toss the old one in the trash?
For the makers of network hardware, the changeover is a perfect way to force obsolescence. This is why even though today's hardware is capable of it, I doubt we'll see many firmware upgrades to enable IPv6 support (unless they charge for the FW upgrades) -- they're going to wait until people can't get online with IPv4 anymore, and then are forced to buy new gear.
In that case they're obviously adding value, and should -- in my opinion -- be able to regain copyright and control over that data.
Uh, no -- that's a terrible idea. The expense involved doesn't buy you a new copyright, if the content is Public Domain, and you're not somehow incorporating it into a new Work, then it's still public domain when it comes out the other end.
What you're talking about is exactly the same sort of a "broadcaster's copyright" that WIPO (read: big media companies) wants to push on us, where they could take things that either aren't copywritable, or are expired, or are in the Public Domain, and re-copyright them just by broadcasting them.
This would allow the person who controls the source, even if that source is in the Public Domain, to have a perpetual copyright, because they could license their broadcasts under terms that would require you to delete or destroy them before they expired (or use DRM that enforced this, which it would be a crime to circumvent).
The point of Public Domain material, is that you can reproduce it and when it comes out the other end, it's still public domain. If you can take public domain and "wrap" it in another layer of copyright which actually taints and eliminates it's public-domain-ness, then you've just gutted the entire concept of having material that's not under copyright. You're saying then, that only the original copy of a public domain material is not under copyright, and that anytime anyone copies that, a new copyright is put in place. That's not how it's supposed to work. Copyright follows the information/content, not some physical artifact.
Anyone asking for a "broadcast copyright" is effectively asking for a perpetual copyright, because that's how it would end up. I think Jack Valenti is a scumbag, but at least he has the balls to come out and actually say that's what he wants.
Exactly. If you want it for 'free', get up off your lazy butts and go tape it yourself. If you want it for the low, low price of telling where it came from, you can now use C-Span's media.
No, the real question here is whether going out and taping something is a creative enough act to warrant a separate Copyright on the recording, than is on the original performance or Work. (Which really boils down to, it the taping some sort of creative act, in and of itself, or is it more like mechanical transcription?)
Copyright doesn't protect effort. I can spend a lifetime compiling a database of recipes, or sports scores, or photocopying/photographing old rare books, and anyone who wants to can use the information out of that (in the case of the recipe book, the layout and narrative text in the recipes might be protected, but not the recipe itself). Nobody is really interested in how much work or effort C-SPAN put into taping things. That doesn't, and shouldn't, earn them a new copyright.
I think it's a hugely dangerous and generally Bad Idea, to create a new layer of copyright protection every time someone mechanically reproduces, copies, or records something. We already have enough complexity, and there are ways that a "reproduction copyright" could be easily (ab)used to lock up works where the originals are unavailable, indefinitely. (Viz.: Disney, who could simply only release recordings of things they have in their "vault" under licenses that don't allow reproduction and which force the destruction of the recordings before their copyright could expire; even though the subject of the recordings would be in the public domain, the recording/retransmission would not be, and thus it would be under a perpetual Copyright.) By recopyrighting mechanical reproductions that do not contain any creative input, you allow whoever possesses the "master" copy to dodge the Public Domain indefinitely.
We need to draw a clear line in the sand as to what things are creative enough to warrant (re)protection, and what are not. Setting up a camera and pointing it at someone, ought not buy you a new copyright on the finished recording. I say this, as someone who spent years lugging a BetaSP camera around -- there's effort there, but it's not creating a new Work, it's just recording one that's already there, however ephemeral. Now, if that video were then taken and edited into something else, that finished, edited composition would have a new Copyright, obviously, but little individual slices of it wouldn't (because they'd be public domain), in the same way I could assemble a photo-montage out of public-domain photos and have the whole thing copyrighted, but not the individual photos inside, if you were to copy just a single one of those and remove it from the whole.
Not necessarily. It would just mean that you'd need to pay for the cost of creating programming during it's first run on TV, and you couldn't resell the same show multiple times. Which actually is how most TV works (well, worked; DVD sales are bigger and bigger now).
The way TV is traditionally paid for, is that the stations sell advertising time, and then they pay the networks (well, actually the networks themselves sell a lot of advertising directly; the locals only get to sell some of a program's ads), and then the network buys the programming from a studio, or produces it itself.
So, for instance, even if the Super Bowl or "24" went immediately into the public domain as they were broadcast, they'd still get on TV, because they make a killing just in their first run. It's the advertising shown during their first broadcast that pays for their creation; any subsequent revenues are just additional profit.
Now, it would certainly change the landscape of television, but it wouldn't "kill TV" outright. The business models which currently operate would have to change dramatically, but there's still a lot of money to be made in entertainment. As long as that demand exists, and people are willing to pay money for it, someone will meet the demand.
1 public IP to 1 private IP? Not much use, really then.
It's not (well, there are some situations where you'd want it, but they're mostly special cases) but most of the usefulness of NAT really comes from it also being a stateful firewall, which keeps track of network connections and thus can hide multiple hosts behind a single IP just by modifying the destination address of the packets as they pass through.
Really, it's academic to say what functionality is part of the "firewall" and what is part of "NAT," because they're almost always an integrated unit, but what I was trying to get at is that a "NAT box" without a stateful firewall (meaning, it only worked 1:1) would be a pretty sorry appliance, and of very limited usefulness. Most of its usefulness, and all of its security, are the result of the connection-tracking, which is also part of every stateful firewall.
Or, conversely, you can remove the NATing functionality from a stateful firewall, and still have all the security benefits that you had with NAT, including blocking of all incoming connections, blocking certain ports to certain hosts, etc. When you take out the "NAT" part, all you're doing is telling the firewall not to modify the IP address anymore, and to pass the packet straight through if that packet is allowed by its rules. There seems to be this idea that you can't have a firewall without NAT, and that's just stupid. Of course people will still have firewalls after the IPv6 migration. They'll probably look suspiciously like the 'home router' boxes we have right now, and will do exactly the same things, except for the IP masquerading / NAT.
To get all the same security as you currently have with IPv4+NAT/FW, all you need to do is use a v6 firewall (which might be just a software upgrade for your router, although I doubt this because the manufacturers will want you to buy a new one) with a default rule that blocks incoming connections. Of course, to get most of the benefits of IPv6, you'll need more complex rules which might allow some incoming connections, but it's trivial to make a IPv6 network just as locked-down as a typically configured IPv4 NATed arrangement.
It is only FAIR to move to IPv6 for the sake of developing countries that will someday find their way onto the Internet in increasing numbers.
Whatever you do, please do not say this in public, because I can't think of anything more damaging to the potential adoption of IPv6, than to paint it as some sort of charity project that will "help" developing countries (particularly because what you're not saying is that it will help them become more competitive with the West).
Nobody is going to spend money to do that, and if they were, they'd probably just contact a charity or something. People are going to go to IPv6 for two reasons: (1) because they have to, because IPv4 addresses will start becoming hard to get, and therefore expensive, and (2) because IPv6 will allow for all sorts of new services, protocols, and applications (like practical user-to-user videoconferencing without a lot of centralized auto-negotiation, multihoming VOIP, and lots of stuff that hasn't been invented yet).
The fact that it will, indeed, help developing countries get online ought to be mentioned as a nice, warm-and-fuzzy coincidence, if it's mentioned at all. Nobody is interested in paying money for that.
It's no harder than it is right now. Most of your portable devices already have unique serial numbers. Your cellphone has two, one in the handset and another in the SIM card. Your computer has a MAC address, probably more than one. Someone could track you with any of these.
IPv6 doesn't change any of this; it just lets you take the same IP address with you when you move from one network to the other, but it doesn't keep you from changing it arbitrarily, or somehow check to see whether your address is the same as your interface's MAC address or not. If you want to use some other randomly generated number instead of your hardware MAC address, you can do that. If you want to change it when you move from one network to another, you can do that, too, but you'll of course drop any connections you had, until you reestablish a connection using the new address to whatever service you were using.
There are some opportunities for very bad design choices in IPv6, but we're just going to have to try and steer people away from making them: for instance, trying to use an address as a user identifier rather than as a temporary network-node identifier. You're still going to have to have logins and passwords, which are managed at some higher level; if someone tried to make the IPv6 address into some sort of per-user authentication credential, that would be a Bad Thing.
But even Microsoft seems to have figured that part out; Windows doesn't even use the MAC address in IPv6, it randomly generates a number, and it's not persistent across reboots (which is/would-be a PITA in other situations, but not for the things most Windows users want to do). So right there, you've got a whole lot of computers that are just going to be using arbitrary values as addresses. That ought to throw a wrench into anyone's evil-genius (or just idiotic) plans to use IPv6s for per-user tracking.
Take a look at Comcast's huge migration of their cable modem customer edge.
I wasn't aware of this. Has Comcast migrated its cable modem subscribers over to IPv6?
Sadly I don't have a v6-capable router at that end of my network. (I have two routers, a good one -- WRT54GL with DD-WRT -- and a crappy one -- some shoddy Netgear box -- and unfortunately have to use the Netgear for the headend NAT, because the '54GL is the only one which will act as a wireless bridge.)
If I were to put a IPv6 capable router on the WAN, would it get a v6 address from Comcast? That would almost make it worth going out and getting another decent router.
Most of the IPv6 stacks have an option to either use the interface's MAC address, or they can randomly generate a number of similar length and use that instead. BSD and Linux use the MAC address but can be changed, Windows uses a random number by default.
First, NAT by itself doesn't offer that much security, once you get it outfitted with UPnP and other stuff that allow users to do the things they want to do, without messing around with it too much. (Actually, NAT in its purest implementation, without a stateful firewall at all, wouldn't offer any security, because it would only serve one host, and it would forward all connections to it, incoming and outgoing. But all home "NAT boxes" also have firewalls and serve multiple hosts, and have the side-effect of blocking incoming connections.)
Second, there are applications coming that aren't going to play well with NAT, particularly internet telephony. We need to get rid of NAT in order to allow for WiFi/cellular phones, and portable devices that will multihome across networks. There are whole classes of applications and technologies that will be possible, once the infrastructure allows for things like this, and NAT is holding it back.
Complaining because NAT makes your printers easier to set up securely, and thus ought to be kept around, is a little like people who grumbled that persistent network connections between campus mainframes were a huge security risk, and that everyone would be better if we just stuck with UUCP and nightly dial-ins. While they may have been right, I think we can all agree that the benefits, in hindsight, of not all being stuck on isolated systems that only connected to each other at midnight to exchange traffic, outweigh the hazards. (If you disagree, signal your discontent by reaching behind your PC and unplugging that network cable or antenna.) It's a shortsighted position.
Until households and "dumb devices" get globally routable addresses, we won't know the sort of things that we can do with them. The ideas that people have outlined today -- the ability to use broadband applications on your cellphone or portable device over your connection at home, and then seamlessly failover to the cellular network (or another WiFi network, or whatever) when you walk out of range, without dropping the connection or needing to do a messy DHCP renewal -- that's just the beginning. That's like someone in 1985 trying to give a sales pitch about the Internet: how many things do we have now that weren't really possible to foresee at that point? (Good and bad.) A whole lot.
Third, even with the widespread adoption of NAT, we're still running out of IPv4s. There are enough applications and situations out there that require routable addresses, that even if we were to use NAT on everything, we'd still run out. It's a temporary solution at best, and an admittedly very cool hack, but we're coming to the end of the road for it. It's time to implement a real solution.
I think that falls under the category of "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." At most, it might buy us a few more months of IPv4dom, but at what cost? And by diverting those resources to IPv4 recovery, how much more painful are we going to make the transition to IPv6 when we do run out? Because the numbers are clear, we are going to run out of allocatable IPv4 addresses eventually. Distracting people by telling them that it's the Class A blocks that are the problem isn't going to make that easier; it's just going to make the eventual runout into a catastrophe instead of a page-three technology topic.
Step 1: Workers leave == Country gets poorer.
Step 2. Workers come in == Country gets richer.
Only if those workers contribute more to the economy and pay more into the system than they consume. It's trivially demonstrable that people at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum consume more than they contribute, and thus are a net drag economically; so it doesn't make sense to let any more of them in.
I haven't even been to the site yet, but let me get this straight: it uses forum software that's worse than Slashdot, and it's full of lawyers.
Oh, gee, where do I sign up for that?
Sure, but what about the "grey" area of: it's not libel or slander, but it does violate the personal privacy of the the object. These aren't "public" persona's, after all.
That's the nice thing about the Law; it really cuts down on those grey areas. Either it's libel or slander, or it's not. Either it's stalking, or it's not. Either it's a crime, or it's not. If it's not, you can say it.
Now, sometimes it can be difficult to determine if it's a crime or not, because we have such a byzantine legal system, but thankfully, we have people who spend their lives studying it, and can render informed opinions on whether things may or may not be illegal. They're called lawyers, and I don't think this guy has them in short supply.
You are citing US law, in other countries 'But Its The Truth' is not always an absolute defence, because the intentions can be taken into account.
I guess it's a good thing we're discussing a U.S.-based website, then.
I have a compromise for you.
You surrender all copyrights to anything you broadcast onto the public's spectrum, but you're free, on narrowly-defined two-way communications bands, to use any form of encryption, encoding, or obfuscation that you want. At the same time, there's no reverse-engineering protection, so no whining if your encryption turns out to be crap.
To be honest, I'd be satisfied with retaining the current copyright structure but just getting rid of the bizarre anti-circumvention provisions, because that's where all the trouble we're in currently, got started. If you're broadcasting a signal that ends up in my house, I ought to be able to do anything I want with it. If you make it impossible to do anything useful with it, without paying you for a decryption key, well perhaps I'll pay you. But if your encryption sucks, that's not my, nor the government's problem.
yeah...except the 'privite controlled method' would be putting more powerfull transmitters all of the place and walking all over everybody elses signal.
Erm, no, that would be illegal. What he's saying is that if you didn't want to give up copyright, you need to own the distribution method also. So, you'd need to sell DVDs or pump the signal out via a cable system that you own every inch of (plus all the ground underneath it, the right-of-ways, etc.).
Joking aside, this is far bigger than an "internet issue;" it's a Copyright issue, and that means it's going to affect not only the internet, but virtually all types of media. When people start re-jiggering Copyright, they're manipulating the foundations that underlie (or undermine, depending on your point of view) our shared culture.
The proposed "broadcast copyright" that's being debated by WIPO would be an absolute disaster. It would probably be the most fundamental change in U.S. law since it was first laid down, because it would basically allow for re-copyrighting of a work without any creative input or modification.
Right now, if I take a work and simply reproduce it without any modifications at all, there's no additional copyright added. Thus, a photo-reproduction of an old work, like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, is still public domain. It's only when I start doing something to it, that it becomes a new work, and subject to another 100+ years of protection. What the draft WIPO treaty would change, is that simply by reproducing/transmitting, a new layer of copyright would be created. So if I "broadcasted" the 1911 Encyclopedia to you, suddenly it wouldn't just have the expired 1911 copyright on it, it would also have my 2007 copyright on the "broadcast."
As long as you kept the originals locked away somewhere, so that the only way people could ever witness them was via a "broadcast," and then you didn't allow them to record or store those broadcasts, you could effectively extend copyright forever.
Your solution only works if paying 'real salaries' is profitable(leaving aside the discussion of whether they are or not, job creation depends on it being profitable to pay someone to do work).
More importantly, we have to ensure that it's profitable. America can't compete with the Third World on wages; it's just not going to happen. The cost of living here is just too high, and unless we want to reduce our standard of living in order to reduce the costs, we have to figure out a way to shield American companies from direct foreign competition. That's the long and short of it, and it's what nobody really wants to say. We have a standard of living that's only achieved by very high costs; companies in other areas don't have these problems. But unless we want to reduce our standards to that of Calcutta's, trying to compete isn't an option.
At least for the moment, America is by far the largest goods-market in the world. We need to use this to our advantage, by ensuring that American companies, and other companies from areas that pay workers well, receive preferential access.
There's quite simply no other way to ensure that workers here are paid enough to maintain our expected standard of living. If we allow immigration and bring in low-cost workers from abroad, wages plummet. If we don't allow immigration but allow cheap imports, than domestic companies go bankrupt (or offshore everything) because they're no longer profitable. Either way, you end up with us collapsing our own economy.
We need to take a far more aggressive stance towards ensuring that our way of life is economically sustainable into the future, and right now I think we're on a collision course with disaster. Nothing less than our way of life is at stake.
Well, note that none of them were in the United States; countries further removed from the events of 9/11 might not have gotten the memo yet: namely, that there's only going to be one way out of a hijacked aircraft, and that's inside a body bag.
Or maybe they have nicer terrorists there. Who knows.
Exactly. If this system ever comes online then hijackers will simply plan and figure out a way to disable the system. Its easier said than done, and probably very costly, but if you get the right hackers you can break into (almost) any system. - Ayal Rosenthal
While this may be true, it doesn't mean that deploying such a system isn't worth it.
What you're saying is exactly like "if we get a bank vault, the thieves will just plan and figure out a way to get into the vault. It's easier said than done, and probably very costly, but if you get the right safecrackers, you can break into almost any bank."
Well, yeah -- but the point isn't that the system is foolproof, it's that the system discourages criminals, or makes them less likely to succeed, before they can be caught or neutralized by other means. Every bank knows that their vault can be broken into with enough effort -- all you need is a big drillpress with a magnetic base, and a diamond-burr coring tool, and enough knowledge of the vault to know where to drill -- but that doesn't mean that they just leave their money out on the counter at night.
By making it harder to hijack a plane, you require any potential hijackers to have more resources, which limits the pool of potential attackers. Rather than hundreds of terrorist groups who could hijack an airliner, you might shorten the list to a few dozen.